HUGE CAMERA ISN’T FOR SNAPSHOTS

UCSD helps with gigapixel device that could watch entire stadium

UC San Diego has helped create the lens for a huge experimental camera that researcher Joseph Ford says could “take a snapshot of a football stadium that’s clear enough to let you recognize every single person in the stadium.”

The lens is the core of AWARE-2, a wide-field system that’s about the size of a night table and packed with cameras that are each roughly as big as a tube of lipstick.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been underwriting the technology in a project led by Duke University. Ford is one of the collaborators.

The camera is designed to take a one-gigapixel image that could be used for such things as surveillance, the monitoring of wildlife, or enriching the coverage of sporting events. The image is produced with a single shot, rather than through stitching together many images taken by one or more cameras. The microcameras form a mosaic that is unusually clear. Plans call for creating a more sophisticated version of the camera that could take 50-gigapixel images.

“Think of hundreds of single-lens reflex cameras all working instantaneously to produce a photo,” said Ford, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

The camera, in its current form, isn’t meant for consumers.

“You can’t really store these images because they’d fill up the memory,” said Ford, who has been collaborating with researcher Eric Tremblay, one of his former graduate students.

“The real use for these kinds of gigantic cameras is for machine vision and automated applications. If you had a single camera at the center of an arena, it could watch every person in the stands and do things like … real-time face and object recognition. You’d know right away if someone dangerous walked in and pulled out a gun.”

When asked if such technology could be misused, Ford said, “Every tool has the potential for use and abuse. There are potentially great benefits. If it was used for automated surveillance at an airport, you could track normal traffic flow. If someone drove the wrong way up a road or traffic came to stop, you’d know right away.”

In separate research, Ford has been developing a 1-millimeter-thick contact lens that contains a telescope. The experimental lens is meant to be used by people who have macular degeneration and other types of degenerative eye disease. The first testing on humans is expected to occur later this year.